Fireside Chat: One Goal for 2019- Trump Declares GM’s Business Model an Act of Treason

Video of Fireside Chat: One Goal for 2019- Trump Declares GM’s Business Model an Act of Treason

In the midst of the constant churning the media employs to distract us, a most salient fact about the future of the United States got buried this December. GM decided to lay off 14,000 workers, closing significant productive capacity, all in pursuit of increasing its stock value and servicing its corporate debt and speculative activities. The only national political figure who seemed to notice this was President Trump.

Imagine a different model where the United States declared that its productive “capacity” (the ability of its labor force to reproduce itself at a much, much higher level), was the central national security imperative —far, far more important than any mere monetary consideration or imagined foreign adversary. That would, actually, be a declaration of reality. Central to that capacity are modern machine tooling capacities which dictate the ability to produce the infrastructure we so desperately need: high speed rail, bridges, canals, locks, whole new cities. Would you allow the labor force employed in doing this to be gutted by an out of control opioid epidemic or to be thrown on the scrap heap because of the insane delusion that money defines economic value? Would you study the types of federal policies through which FDR solved the last Depression, using the American credit system to target the actual living productive cells in the economy for active growth rather than suffocating them under mounds of useless debt? Would you order a mission, like a mobilization for war, to employ the remaining skilled machinists in building new infrastructure while training an entire new generation of machine builders in the process?

The British have done something far more than attempting to overthrow a duly elected President, Donald Trump. They have poisoned the entire mode in which we think about economics, making hegemonic the free trade, austerity, imperial regimes which confront us daily. Whether they succeed in overthrowing Trump depends on whether citizens change the way they think about economics. There is a revolt underway about this in the formerly industrial Midwest, a revolt we can harness, at this unique moment in history, to turn the flank on our actual enemy. Join us for tonight’s discussion with Bill Roberts, LaRouchePAC’s Midwest coordinator.